Selective call receivers, such as pagers, typically receive a radio frequency signal, which is decoded to recover an address and a message included therein. Generally, when the received address corresponds to a stored receiver address, the received message is stored in the memory of the selective call receiver. Additionally, upon receipt and storage of a message, the selective call receiver provides a sensible alert, such as an audible tone, to announce reception of the message to a user. Thereafter, either automatically or in response to user initiated commands, the message is retrieved from memory and presented to the user. The presentation of the message can be, for example, a visual presentation by a display or an audible presentation by a transducer.
As further messages are received, each is processed in the above-described manner. As a result, situations can arise in which the memory of the selective call receiver becomes full, i.e., no available memory space remains. In this case, some conventional selective call receivers delete older messages as necessary to free memory space for storage of newly received messages. This deletion method, however, can easily result in the deletion of a message before it has been read or the deletion of a message which is of importance to the user.
Thus, what is needed is a method and apparatus for prioritizing the deletion of stored messages.